Alter Ego
by danglingdingle
Summary: In the category of Questions Not Answered, Will takes his own avenue to find the questions as well as the answers. Strongly implied Jack/Will slash.


-1Title: Alter Ego

Characters: Will(/Jack)

Warnings: drug use, slash, angst

Disclaimer: Characters are Disney's

Summary: In the category of Questions Not Answered, Will takes his own avenue to find the questions as well as the answers.

Sooper Speshul thanks to veronica_rich for beta, and mamazano and komandant_krech for encouragement.

All mistakes are mine.

Alter Ego

If it was a common whore house or a proper tea parlour, Will didn't particularly care.

All that mattered was that here he could do what he came here to do, he'd gotten his point across, albeit awkwardly, his shilling was valid currency, and he had soft enough pillows to sit on in front of the low table.

A heavily painted, white-faced woman with small red lips lit the charcoal on the shisha until it burned steadily.

The woman straightened her broad sleeves and bowed towards Will with her arms stretched in front of her as if waiting for something to be placed there. Will raised a brow questioningly and the woman bowed again, signaling toward Will's sword. Glancing at the weapon, Will understood what the woman wanted as he remembered the incident he'd witnessed the night they arrived to Singapore, with that fool fighting invisible demons and finally thrusting his sword into his own stomach. It wouldn't do anyone much good if Will found himself dead too, come morning.

Reluctantly Will acquiesced to the wordless request and placed his sword on the woman's arms, whereupon she instantly wrapped her sleeves and folded her arms over it as if for protection. The clatter of her strange wooden shoes clomped her retreat before one more deep bow and a swish of sleek fabric as she turned and walked away.

The curtains fell behind the woman and Will was left alone in the dimly lit, solitary cranny. He shifted on his seating hesitantly, crossed his legs, raised his hand, paused once more to ask himself what it was he was doing and nodded in final agreement.

He took the pipe and inhaled again after being breathless for months.

Bone white smoke towered into the air until it reached the path of the light sifting through the paper lamp screen colouring the lunt pale red. Will closed his eyes at the memory of the bloodied froth of the waves after a ship had been pulled under water.

Haunted by the need to find answers to the questions, Will's life had been burdened from day to day while he carefully avoided uttering them out loud, all out of fear.

For the first time in his life, Will Turner confessed to being afraid.

Never before had he faced an opponent so stealthy, so conniving, an adversary so bold as to have the gall to stare him dead in the eye, unwavering from its stance under Will's piercing scrutiny:

His own mind.

Will's senses heightened, colours poured through the glass of the water pipe, sifting into playful reflections on the table before turning into edges that cut his eyes even through their lids. The distant sounds made him want to bury his head in the pillows for an escape, full decades of sensory torture before the next inhale lulled and laid him down within sweetly smelling clouds.

The cool smoke coursing through Will's lungs forced the fear aside, unveiled notes he'd not dared to bring forward from the edges of his consciousness before.

In the sudden quiet there were thoughts flashing in front of his mind's eye like flipping through an old, worn out book, picture after picture, page after page until his fingers touched dark parchment, a soft sheet of vellum stretched taut, bearing letters in rows after rows, inked and pierced and slightly weathered.

The words were not clear. The illusion was as imperfect as the carrier of the frame. Lucid, yet impossible.

Eyes closed, Will reached up into the phantasm, brought his skin into contact with the thin air to touch the words, to re-paint them with the translucent ink that collected under his tongue at the sight of the back of the origin his fear.

With the artificial bliss coursing through him, Will smiled.

The false happiness pretended to be a moment of content, and beyond, fooling him to arousal and postponed the inevitable seconds of clarity he knew were spelled right in front of him.

At his touch the deception turned and the tips of Will's fingers met heat, a single word gasped as a hand stroked smooth skin tentatively, then tightened its hold, stroked, and Will stepped outside himself.

He watched himself eagerly from aside, head tilted, a furrow between his brows, concentrated on the movement as he saw himself lower his breeches enough to make way, how he writhed on the floor, frigging his own flesh, pushing into his own fist, twisting his own nipple and almost feeling the hands of another.

Will looked on as he saw himself fighting to open his eyes to see, but the lips almost pressed softly on his eyelid and the thumb almost on the corner of his other eye would not let him.

Beard almost brushing over Will's thigh, tongue almost laving a clear drop off the tip of Will's cock and when he could almost feel the wet heat around his erection and almost heard the low hum of pleasure of giving pleasure, it was already over and Will's seed splattered on his belly and the hem of his shirt, while his back arched off the floor and his mouth opened to a silent, desperate moan.

The Will that now stood behind the prone spirit -how he got there, neither of them knew- leaned forward and squinted, trying to read what was written there.

Without the restraining lips on him, the Will on the floor could crack his eyes open a fraction to look at the apparition still gently sucking Will's twitching cock.

Exhausted, drained, Will, in unison, drew in a breath and managed a whisper; "You're not really here. You're nothing but hallucination."

A wicked grin formed languidly at one corner of the mouth wrapped around Will's now flaccid prick, and was followed by a lazy conspiratorial wink and a slow lick before the reverie quivered, faded and became one with the lingering smoke…right when they could make out the words on the skin this upside-down world declared as the answer:

Be…cynical about love

He looked himself in the eye for a blink and was relentlessly drawn towards himself, heaved back to the hollow, no time for an escape, no chance to join the ghost.

Darkness. Black. Perhaps a dream with gold and faint jingle and silent laughter and rum and tar.

Rich, thick ache pulsed in his temples and under his eyes with the tattoo of his heart when Will came back to this reality.

A couple more beats, a deep breath to hold and let out, a slow intake of the surroundings and the supine form tensed, shuddered, and sprang up on his feet.

Awake and alert, Will pulled up his breeches, glanced at the table and grimaced.

The charcoal on the shisha had burned and turned to ash, the glass was dull, no shimmer or sparkle of lights playing with his senses.

He'd been chasing dragons only to find dust and eluding dreams and irrationality, covered with more madness. A voice in the back of his mind murmured that he'd read it wrong, but it made no sense, so Will didn't listen.

There was nothing for him here.

There had never been anything for him here.

Frustrated, enraged by his disappointment, Will grabbed the pipe and smashed it on the floor, shattering green glass and splattering water into droplets across the room.

Mordacious chagrin tugged his mouth to a parody of a smirk, as the ironic metaphor of the shards of glass weren't lost on him; the hammer hadn't shattered him yet, so it must be it was forging him into steel.

Will closed his eyes briefly to fortify himself against the throb in his head before starting toward the door. He had to get out of here and never return. He needed his sword.

Time to go.

A/N2: Be cynical about love is a butchered line from Desiderata


End file.
